Britain’s car market is a complete disaster

In which the nation's most average driver tries to buy a new car and realises we’re all poor now.

A new genre I like to call ‘financial horror’

Jennifer is the most average driver in the most average car in Britain. Born in 1984, (average age) her parents gave her the most common girl’s name of that year. By 2014, aged 30, she earned enough money to buy a brand new car for the first time. She chose a base model Ford Fiesta, Britain’s most popular car that year, and paid a shade over £10,000 for it - equivalent to £13,500 in today’s money. She still drives it today - nearly half of all cars on the road right now are a similar age or more.

Jennifer is in slow-moving traffic on the M25, swearing vigorously and creatively at the back of a white van¹. She is thinking about buying a new car, which is both exciting and a bit scary. She loves her Fiesta but it’s getting long-in-the-tooth, and a bit cramped now that she has a husband (Michael, most common boy’s name in 1984) and a child (Sophia, 2017). She’s had a good experience with Ford, so her thoughts naturally turn to the larger Ford Focus, the nation’s second favourite car after the Fiesta. They started at £14k when she was last looking, which would be around £18k today, which is roughly Jennifer’s expectation.

Later today, Jennifer will visit the Ford UK website. Spoiler alert: it will not go well.The 2024 Ford Focus is not in fact £18k. It’s not even £28k. The absolute cheapest is £28,500, but in true Ford tradition that’s only if you have it in a specific shade of red that Jennifer, a woman of good taste, finds objectionable². Anything else is basically thirty grand.

Jennifer thinks that’s bullshit. Because it is bullshit.

So Jennifer looks for a cheaper model. There is no Fiesta of course, that was discontinued in 2023. The most affordable model in Ford’s range is now the Puma, a ‘compact’ SUV which is bigger than the Fiesta in every way. It’s 300 kilos heavier, which is the equivalent of carrying two Eddie ‘The Beast’ Halls in the back seat³, and several inches wider and longer. But the most… biggerest feature is the price, which starts at a frankly ridiculous £26,300.

In other words, if Jennifer walked into a Ford showroom with a suitcase of cash and bought the absolute cheapest car on sale, with no frills or options, it would cost her a staggering sixteen thousand Great British pounds more than a decade ago, twice as much money after inflation. Oh, and she’d be forced to buy an SUV.

This isn’t just a Ford problem, the same applies for every other brand and model on the top ten best-sellers list in 2014:

• Vauxhall’s Corsa (3) and Astra (5) started at £9,500 and £13,250 respectively. They’re now £20,500 and £25,000, and that’s for petrol versions that will be phased out soon - the cheapest hybrid Corsa is £23,000.

• Volkswagen’s Golf (4) and Polo (7) started at £13,500 and £11,000 respectively - they now start around £28,000 and £21,000.

• Nissan’s Qashqai (6) and Juke (10) started at £17,500 and £15,250 respectively. They’re now £30,000 and £23,500.

• Audi’s A3 (8) started at around £16,500, it’s now basically £30,000.

• Fiat’s 500 (9) started at around £10,250, and is now nearer £17,000.

The massive increases in price, size and weight are down to two things: mandatory safety systems that require increasingly sophisticated arrays of cameras, sensors, electronics, impact systems, and so on; and the requirement for manufacturers to move to new hybrid and electric drivetrains. You simply can’t fit all this stuff inside cars smaller than an SUV or an executive saloon, or build it much cheaper. And as staggering as these increases are, they get even worse when we consider the cheapest electric cars from these brands.

Like most millennials, Jennifer cares about the environment. She recycles diligently, hates wasting food, and has an RSPB membership she received as a birthday present from an aunt that she feels too guilty to cancel (the membership, not the aunt). For these and other reasons she’s curious about electric cars, but the prices verge on comical, easily £30-40k and upwards for anything family-sized with decent range.

Here are the cheapest examples from the same brands:

• Ford’s Explorer, £40k, 370 mile range.

• Vauxhall’s Corsa: £30k, 220 mile range.

• Volkwagen’s ID3: £31k, 240 mile range.

• Nissan’s Leaf: £29k, 160 mile range (and an hour to recharge from 20-80%).

• Audi’s Q4 e-Tron: £48k, 210 mile range (and half an hour to recharge from 10-80%).

• Fiat’s 500E: £25k, 118 mile range.

Frustrated by all this, Jennifer is venting to her colleagues when Ben the IT guy, an electric car enthusiast and committed Internet debater⁴, shows her an option that’s not only within budget but electric too - the Dacia Spring. Dacia is not a brand Jennifer is familiar with, and like many consumers she takes a risk-averse attitude to unknown brands where there’s a potential for disappointment. Still, she’s curious and open-minded and frankly desperate enough to take a look at the specs.

The Dacia Spring is billed as ‘Europe’s most affordable electric car’ at the time of writing, yours for ‘just’ £15k. For that you get a car with a range of 140 miles, which will feel much longer because it takes nearly 20 seconds to reach 60mph and can barely top the national speed limit on a flat road. When you need to top up, it takes a mere 45 minutes to charge from 20% to 80%, which means roughly one minute of charging for every two miles you want to drive. It also boasts a 1-star NCAP safety rating, which means that it meets the absolute bare minimum standard to be driveable on a British road⁵.

Jennifer is not impressed, which Ben finds frustrating. He points out - rightly! - that this is all she needs for the vast majority of her driving - school runs, the commute across town, trips to the supermarket and so on. She rarely drives more than 20 or 30 miles in a day and can recharge the car on her driveway overnight, making range and charging time a non-issue. A top speed of 78mph isn’t a hindrance when you’re bimbling around in 30mph zones. He is smart enough not to say so out loud, but Ben thinks Jennifer’s reluctance to consider the Spring is deeply irrational, rooted in a failure to interrogate her own needs⁶.

But Jennifer is a practical woman with a keen sense of value and limited patience for bullshit, who - correctly! - feels like she’s being ripped-off.

Jennifer doesn’t understand why she should pay more money than her previous car for a vastly inferior, vastly more limited product. While on paper it might be true that those limitations wouldn’t matter most of the time, the fact is life isn’t lived on paper: she has a growing child, ageing parents, changing responsibilities, and she lives in an increasingly uncertain and volatile world. She understands that car ownership isn’t just about predictable daily use, but giving herself the freedom and flexibility to make choices, to deal with whatever life throws at her in the near future. A car is a possibility engine, an extremely powerful problem-solving device, a security blanket.

So Jennifer makes her decision, which is really the only decision she could make within her budget. It is, of course, a Ford Focus… from 2020. She buys it from an approved Ford dealer with less than 15,000 miles on the clock and a 1 year warranty that she can extend if she wants. It’s basically as good as new, with all the mod-cons like Apple CarPlay that she wants. It’s fun, reliable and safe, a trusted model and brand with a 5-star NCAP safety rating, it can reach 60mph in a sporty 8 seconds or so, and it’s economical to service and maintain. It’s exactly what she wanted. It’s blue. It’s about the same price as the Dacia and it won’t depreciate like the Titanic.

Faced with utter nonsense, Jennifer chose to opt out. Unsurprisingly, millions of car owners are doing the same - seeing the outrageous sticker prices and confusing specs and walking straight back out of the showroom. Per Autocar: “of the 34 million cars on the roads, 16 million – almost one in two – are more than a decade old. Among these cars, 10.5 million are aged over 12 years.” Those numbers are already growing, and unless costs come down massively they’re going to accelerate even faster once only plug-in hybrids and electric cars are allowed on sale.

You could argue that it’s a good thing if we buy cars less often, keep them longer, and reduce our consumption of the raw materials used to make them; but transitioning to a low-carbon economy means getting people on to electric cars or plug-in hybrids sooner or later, and you can’t do that if they’re clinging on to their old emission-farting vehicles well into the 2030s. Right now, private buyers simply aren’t convinced by EVs, despite steep discounts, and there’s little sign of that changing soon.

London, the distant future

But more than that, Jennifer and millions like her feel poorer, like their standard of living is going backwards, and that’s a really bad and corrosive thing when it comes to things like ‘people feeling the country is well run’. To a large degree we measure our place in society by the things we can afford. Whether that’s a good thing or not is a philosophical debate for another time; what matters here is that millions of middle-class people are finding that their expectations are wrong, that they’re poorer than they thought. You might call that a first-world problem, but understandably that frightens them, makes them feel insecure, and erodes their trust in government.

The hope of course is that PHEVs and EVs will get cheaper and better, driven by falling battery prices, and by the time Jennifer comes to buy her next car she’ll be able to get something new at a decent price. But… what if they don’t?

If it were just about battery technology I’d be optimistic, but the sheer scope and expense of safety features required by regulators could mean that it just isn’t possible to bring prices down to the kind of levels they were at 5 or 10 years ago, even adjusting for inflation. Maybe, like so many other things we used to build more easily in the 20th century, the era of ‘cheap car’ is already over.

If that’s the case, it’s because regulators and governments - a Conservative government in the U.K.⁷ - decided to double the price of something a huge chunk of the nation relies on in the space of ten years without any clear mandate for it, or a serious plan to help people with the enormous costs and inconveniences that now face them. Of course it’s good that cars are cleaner and safer, but who got to decide the price for this?

This isn’t a screed against Net Zero⁸ or an exercise in climate denialism. But if you want to achieve real, lasting progress on these issues you need to bring the public along for the ride, and that simply hasn’t happened here. We’ve ended up with heavy, bloated cars, poor charging infrastructure and roads that are falling apart even as everything gets wildly more expensive. Voters are entitled to ask: WTF? It’s hard to imagine an approach more calculated to undermine public support for climate action.

And when we talk about democratic deficits in the West, rising anti-government sentiment, palpable frustration among working and middle class voters who feel that things are getting worse, their standard of living is in steep decline and they’re simply not listened to… well I’m not naive enough to believe that this is the most important issue, but “you made my car twice as expensive” is a good example.

1. The white van has been occupying the middle lane for three miles while the driver fiddles with his phone. If challenged, the white van man will insist that sitting in the middle lane is ‘safer because you don’t have to keep changing lanes’. He is wrong.

2. Because it looks like it was chosen by a child.

3. In terms of mass, but not factoring in e.g. the snacking requirements of Eddie ‘The Beast’ Hall, a man who eats up to 10,000 calories a day and would therefore require a quantity of snacks that could be described as ‘profound’.

4. One might even say a master debater, or something approximating that.

5. On the plus side it’ll be hard to hit anything fast enough to really test the safety features.

6. Ben considers himself a feminist ally, and is always keen to point out to women where they could be doing better.

7. I’m not saying this to single them out over Labour, who would obviously have done the same, but to make the point that while we expect this stuff from Labour its kind of nuts that the Tories are in the same part of the political compass.

8. Luckily nobody on the Internet reads things in bad faith.